Since his inauguration, Barack Obama has drastically expanded the use of so-called “signature” drone strikes—killings that aren’t targeted against any person in particular, but against someone who looks or acts a certain way. Precisely which behavioral patterns or appearances are sufficient to sign an aerial death sentence remain an absolute state secret—all we know about the so-called “pattern of life activity” sufficient to justify the killing of an unidentified stranger is based on media reports quoting anonymous U.S. officials.

In 2008, the New York Times reported that a “signature” can be as vague as “the characteristics of Qaeda or Taliban leaders on the run.” A later Times report said targets could include anyone near “training camps and suspicious compounds”—dicey given the Pentagon’s lackluster record when it comes to assessing compounds. The body of anonymously provided evidence suggests that loose suspicion is about all it takes to condemn someone on the ground, and based on the resultant craters, it’s easy to see that standards are lax.

In 2011, a 16-year-old American citizen named Abdulrahman Anwar al-Awlaki was killed by a drone-fired missile while eating outside in Yemen just two weeks after his father, an Islamist cleric on the CIA kill list, was drone-assassinated. Abdulrahman’s signature appears to have consisted of little more than traveling with his father and looking like the people around his father. When Attorney General Eric Holder was questioned about Abdulrahman’s assassination, he said only that he was “not specifically targeted by the United States.”

Although he’s been the most visible (and controversial) drone victim due to his citizenship, al-Awlaki is far from the only child killed on Obama’s orders—the Bureau of Investigative Journalism estimates that upwards of 204 kids have been killed by drones in Pakistan alone since 2004. Some of them might’ve simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time, but only the CIA knows how many were killed because they matched some classified “signature.”

We also know that computerized crimes are enough for a death sentence: 21-year-old Brit Junaid Hussain was reportedly killed by a U.S. drone in Syria last month for the high crimes of Twitter propagandizing and hacking into American computer systems with the sophistication of someone half his age. Another propagandist, American Al-Qaeda magazine editor Samir Khan, was blown up alongside Anwar al-Awlaki—Holder also described him as “not specifically targeted” by the CIA.

But some State Department officials have complained to the White House that the criteria used by the C.I.A. for identifying a terrorist “signature” were too lax. The joke was that when the C.I.A. sees “three guys doing jumping jacks,” the agency thinks it is a terrorist training camp, said one senior official. Men loading a truck with fertilizer could be bombmakers — but they might also be farmers, skeptics argued.

Imagine then, that a CIA analyst in Virginia or drone pilot in Nevada sees 14-year-old Ahmed from 10,000 in the air, working with a bundle of wires and metallic pieces.

Resource exploitation, military occupation and so-called “anti-terror” efforts led by Western countries are destabilizing several countries in Africa, leading to widespread starvation and sickness for millions of people. Famine has become a daily fact of life for many in Somalia, South Sudan and elsewhere in Africa.

Iraqi agriculture expert Dr. Nakd Altameemi joins Mnar Muhawesh on ‘Behind the Headline’ to discuss the devastating toll that war, sanctions and Western corporations have had on Iraq’s centuries-old agricultural traditions.

Rania Khalek, an independent journalist who has been blacklisted for her recent reports on Syria, joins Mnar Muhawesh on ‘Behind the Headline’ to discuss the silencing of journalists who oppose the mainstream media’s pro-war agenda.

As an unprecedented wave of outrage swells against the Trump administration, Mnar Muhawesh, host of ‘Behind the Headline,’ wonders why people weren’t more outraged with Obama’s policies on mass surveillance, whistleblowers, and war.